Houston's Hope: Space Station Could Shorten Hard Times

January 31, 1986|By Jim Nesbitt, Sentinel Atlanta Bureau

HOUSTON — Oil and space are Houston's national image, and both are in trouble.

In the past 17 months a worldwide petroleum glut has cut 159,000 jobs from this area's economy. Still, 35 percent of the 1.5 million jobs come from the energy industry -- oil and associated businesses.

Now it appears similar hard times could hit the space industry in the aftermath of Tuesday's explosion of the shuttle Challenger with its crew of seven aboard.

Space exploration is a smaller piece of Houston's economy, between 10,000 and 30,000 jobs, but more and more businessmen, particularly those in the high-tech communities that ring the Johnson Space Center, believe space is the way to future growth and the thing needed to fill the vacuum left by falling oil prices.

NASA officials say there will be no long-range impact on space exploration, nor a cutback in the 10,000 jobs at the Johnson Space Center, the hub of suburbs housing 100,000 people.

''All the planning to prepare for flights will continue,'' said NASA spokeswoman Barbara Schwartz. ''We're just not going to fly.''

But space industry insiders aren't so optimistic. They worry the disaster will slow development of private space exploration companies and reduce companies clamoring for a slot in the space freighter's cargo bay.

''It's bound to have an impact,'' said David Langstaff, financial officer of a company that hopes to link the shuttle with a manned station in space by 1990. ''People will slow down and reassess the risks.''

''It all depends on how quick we get a fix and get flying again,'' said Earl Smith, an aerospace consultant and former NASA engineer.

It was 19 years ago that a fire while a rocket was on the launching pad for a test killed astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. It brought 20 months of delay in the space program and modest layoffs here.

NASA veterans also remember cuts that came with the end of the Apollo lunar program in 1971. Center employment dropped from 12,000 to 3,500, mostly among NASA contractors. Engineers became cab drivers and teachers.

NASA contractors now hope the space station program will help avoid a replay of the lunar letdown, but a Congress looking for budget cuts could make the shuttle and space station easy targets.

''It's going to be real easy for the fence sitters to say delay the space station until we get this shuttle problem solved,'' said one of NASA's major contractors.

At stake is the future of the shuttle, its spinoff commerce and a space station program that could add 5,000 employees to the center's payroll and increase its $603 million contribution to the economy here by 40 percent.

''Houston is one of the few places where you still see a lot of cranes'' at work in construction, said Gerald Griffin, president of the Houston Chamber of Commerce and former space center director.

NASA's major contractors -- Grumman, Lockheed, Rockwell, Boeing -- are snapping up office space in the small suburbs of Nassau Bay and Clear Lake City in a ''desire to create quite an on-site presence in Houston,'' he added. Griffin and others hope this expansion will nurture a trend toward diversification by space center contractors. Some, like Singer-Link, builder of the shuttle simulator, already are using their workers here on projects not tied to space.

''Many contractors here have business that's not related to NASA because they've established a center here, their engineers prefer working here,'' said David Ross, president of the Clear Lake Area Chamber of Commerce.

Griffin believes that will help the space center weather even the worst -- a delay in the space station.